Khan Academy and Central Square Foundation have launched Khan Academy – Hindi, starting with lessons in various grades of NCERT recommended Maths curriculum. The platform will keep adding more videos, practice exercises and tutorials in Hindi for free.
As of now, the Hindi website features lessons in Maths for standards 5 to 8, with additional lessons in basic math, arithmetic, pre algebra and basic geometry. It provides a separate login for students, teachers and parents, similar to its English website. The academy mentions that users might currently end up seeing some English content in lessons, but it is working on translating all of it.
Interestingly, the academy mentions that it has efforts underway to translate its lessons to other Indic languages including Bangla, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya, Sinhala, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Users wanting to help in translating lessons to other languages can apply here.
The English version of Khan Academy features a lot more content in not only Math, but on other topics like Science, Economics, Computing and Test prep for IIT JEE, MCAT, GMAT etc. It also features various talks and interviews. However, none of this content is yet ported to Hindi, and we imagine it will take quite a while to translate it all. Other than Hindi, the Academy offers lessons in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and French.
Vuclip partnership: Interestingly, in 2013, Vuclip launched a mobile video channel edu that would feature educational videos for K-12 and higher education, partnering with Khan Academy for the videos. At the time, Vuclip had said it would include course material in Indian languages as well. However, this initiative has made very little progress since then, offering pretty much the same content for two years. We expect Khan Academy will do better by launching the vernacular website, and translating the content with the help of its volunteers and the education focused NGO Central Square Foundation.
Developments in the MOOCs:
– Last month, online open course provider Udacity raised $105 million.
– In August, Times Internet entered into a strategic partnership with Coursera, a massive open online courses (MOOCs) company, to ‘assist Coursera’s growth in India’. Times Internet also participated in Coursera’s Series C funding worth $49.5 million which took place in August.
– In April, LinkedIn reportedly acquired online tutorials and training platform Lynda.com for $1.5 billion.
– In June, IIM Bangalore (IIM-B) launched a series of free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in partnership with EdX.
– In May, the British Council launched a series of free MOOCs on IELTS and English for teachers and students on the FutureLearn platform.
